I am a fan of the work of the French writer Paul Valéry. He was a poet, but also a great observer and reflected on the artistic process of poetry and artworks. He wrote for example a book about Leonardo da Vinci and about the process of creation. For my Master thesis I studied his work about the artistic process of creation and some poems of his hand and it inspires me until today.

This weekend I visited Genoa, an Italian city at the sea where Valéry lived for a short time as a guest of his aunt Cabella in Palazzo Montanaro. In 1892 during a heavy storm in Genoa, he underwent an existential crisis and in 1898 he decided to quit writing. In Genoa he wrote letters to André Gide and Gustave Fourment. In letters to Fourment and Gide he described also the city Genoa with its great palazzi, food, coffee, different smells and of course the sea. In 1917, he broke his period of great silence and published his famous work La Jeune Parque.